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Tricia Wang: 'Building transparency in China, one lunch at a time'

This article was taken from the August 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

We often think of internet-powered revolutionary change as enacted through a model of forcing political change through civil disobedience, such as the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street. But, here in China, I've been documenting the emergence of a model that uses crowdsourced fundraising, social-media transparency and social pressure to forge a collective action that is apolitical and effective in changing policy from below. It's called Free Lunch.

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On Sina Weibo, China's largest microblog, more than a million Chinese citizens have raised RMB ¥30 million (£3m) to provide free lunches to malnourished children in over 160 rural schools in one year.

The programme originated with Chinese journalist Deng Fei, who made a name for himself exposing child kidnapping and organ harvesting. When he received a tip from a teacher that schoolchildren in the countryside were too impoverished to eat lunch, he investigated the situation and realised that the problem was nationwide. He quit his job as a journalist and dedicated his time to solving the problem. He started posting pictures of children, accompanied with requests for donations from his estimated 200,000 fol<span class="s2">lowers at the time (he now has two million).

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Free Lunch was launched at a difficult time for fundraisers: researchers had revealed a massive scandal at the Red Cross Society of China where donations were being used to pay for an official's mistress. Donations to the Red Cross fell by four fifths and charities faced widespread mistrust.

Well aware of the need to make Free Lunch trustworthy, Deng Fei implemented a combination of online and offline tactics to build layers of transparency. Participating schools can't just take food and distribute it. Every day they must publicly post their accounting to Sina Weibo. A sample 140-character post will include details that mostly look this:

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In addition to using social media, Free Lunch recruits a local group of retired village officials to oversee the school's accounts and confirm that the children are actually being fed. Also, his two million Weibo followers are encouraged to closely monitor schools' online accounting. Deng Fei and the schools publicly respond to every Weibo inquiry about how the funds are being used.

Any financial misreporting results in schools losing their funds, so teachers are careful to post accurate information, with some spending an hour drafting the 140-character posts to Weibo on their phones (most schools don't have computers). What we are seeing is a collective social shift in the way information feedback and accountability are being conceptualised. Free Lunch sets a new bar for providing donors with updates; annual reports no longer suffice.

The innovation is not just in the use of social media, but also in information transparency that earns the public's trust one post at a time. In effect, Free Lunch doesn't just crowdsource funding: it also crowdsources monitoring, which results in a jujitsu act of getting individuals to see themselves as members of a community who can create the change they want to see. As a result, the rhetoric has shifted away from blaming the government towards holding the community itself responsible for the outcome.

Free Lunch has proved itself as a model. Seven months after it launched, the government invested ¥16 million in a similar programme.

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Programmes such as Free Lunch are introducing new cultural values and practices to China. They also reveal that crowdsourced fundraising that doesn't track real-time effectiveness may not be suitable for non-Western contexts. Free Lunch leverages people's compulsion not just to do good, but to engage in shared responsibility.

This kind of innovation builds the foundation for future macro-innovations in transparency. It hacks the system using existing tools, creating viruses of hope that even one person can contribute to social change.

Tricia Wang is a China- and US-based cultural sociologist who uses a range of ethnographic methods to create commercially relevant insights about people's interaction with the internet. Her writing and talks are at triciawang.com